There will be tons of thinkpieces and speculatory pieces and blame-assigning pieces coming out about these over the next 168 hours or so, so pace yourself. That includes you, Chief Moir...

Police have viewed footage from two of the vehicle’s cameras, one facing forward toward the street, and the other inside the car facing the driver. Based on the footage, Moir said that the driver had little time to react. “The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” she said. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”

She added, “It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode [autonomous or human-driven] based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway.”

Safe streets advocates were quick to denounce Moir’s comments as tone deaf, inappropriate, and possibly misinformed. The Tempe Police Department has since walked some of it back, issuing a statement that reads, “Tempe Police Department does not determine fault in vehicular collisions.”

Now what we can do, however, is note some of the curious aspects of the story. Let's start with what the Tempe PD said just now...they do not determine fault in vehicle collisions. Well who does?

The Arizona collision happened on a road with seven driving lanes and two bicycle lanes. The speed limit there is 35 miles an hour, the equivalent of 55 kilometres an hour.

Sorry Oliver Moore, lying reporter but check out some of the other coverage. Here's the Verve article linked at the top of this post:

The vehicle was traveling 38 mph, though it is unclear whether that was above or below the speed limit. (Police said the speed limit was 35 mph, but a Google Street View shot of the roadway taken last July shows a speed limit of 45 mph along that stretch of road.) The driver, 44-year-old Rafaela Vasquez, has given a statement to police.

But here's where all the media seem to have missed the point. It's probable that this dumb hippie cyclist jumped out in front of the automated car inappropriately: their kind do that a lot, you get numb to it. Meanwhile the difference in reality between 35 and 45 is going to be pretty much negligible, as readers of this space are well aware I'm an advocate of driving double the speed limit all the time. But if news agencies after the fact can't agree on a road's speed limit, what chance to driverless cars have? And if you abhore speeding how do you account for the possibility of it happening ignorantly en masse (without the human factor of knowing when your abilities are better than your current speed allows?) More vitally, why don't these pricks get charged with speeding like the innocent guy who followed his TomTom (no chuckles please), or even just went on what he remembered or assumed the speed limit to be?

2018-03-17

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone. Your humble blogger is currently in an exciting and undisclosed location celebrating this holiest of occasions by embracing two modern traditions that would be totally alien to both St. Patrick and a devotee of his a mere century ago.

The second tradition is wearing orange in addition to (or even instead of) green. As astute readers of this blog may have noticed, I'm not Catholic. On top of that, not only do I support keeping Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but I think the Republic of Ireland was a mistake in the first place and the UK should have been the totality of both isles. As a result, it's only fitting that I support the orange third of the Irish flag. (I'll probably drink a Black and Tan as well, just to be cheeky). As Pulpit and Pen puts it (profoundly):

First, Patrick wasn’t Irish. Patrick was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, where he was raised to the age of 16. Secondly, Patrick wasn’t Catholic. Patrick’s father was a deacon and his grandfather a pastor in the very early Christian Church of Britain, which had no affiliation whatsoever to the Bishop of Rome.

Put plainly, any attempt to Catholicize Patrick by the church of Rome is pure fiction, made up by the Harlot Beast herself.

In Ireland, Roman Catholics wear green. But Protestants, however, wear Orange (in honor of William of Orange, the great Protestant king). So when you go to that St. Paddy’s day celebration, wear orange and explain to people why; it’s a good opportunity to share the Gospel.

In the song, he covers a little bit of Irish whiskey drinking. When I was in Ireland a few years back I made sure to start up a round of this song at the bar: there were enough other Albertans around that we could make a solid go at singing it. The key lyrics are:

Well I've heard it said that you can get some heat in Irish pubs
Servin' Jamesons to an Orangeman and Bushmills to his cuz
Well here's what you do with Tullamore Dew, you can meet 'em both halfway
It's time to switch to whiskey they've been drinkin' beer all day

For those of you unfamiliar, Bushmills is distilled in Northern Ireland where the Orangemen are, and Dublin is certainly not a friendly place for Irish Loyalists!

However, this lyric bothered me more than a little bit. Having explored Ireland I learned that the song is ridiculously inaccurate...it may explain some of the weird looks they were giving me at that tavern in Dublin (not far, of course, from the Jameson Distillery). A few days later I visited (as you might) the Tullamore D.E.W. Visitor Centre, a leisurely half day drive almost due west of Dublin. The key note here is that Tullamore is smack dab in the middle of The Republic of Ireland (almost literally) but is no closer to the 13 provinces of Northern Ireland than the republican capital is. Both in a geographical sense as you can see in the map below) but also culturally.

The worst thing is that the Tullamore Dew distillery seen in the photo is a historic building dating back to...2014. The original Tullamore Dew ran from 1829 until 1954, after which production moved to County Cork in the far southest of the country and about as far from Northern Ireland as you can be without drowning. While founded by Michael Molloy, the real father of the distillery was one Daniel E. Williams. Williams was born in the Quaker (ie. Protestant) down of Mountmellick but he himself was Catholic. So we have a Catholic "greenie" making a whiskey with a green label that for the last 50 years was produced in the heart of the greenest part of Ireland...and that's "halfway"?

In fairness, Jameson was founded in Dublin but is no longer distilled there...it is instead distilled...in Cork...next door to where Tullamore Dew was made from 1954-2013. So in fairness new Tullamore is closer to halfway to Bushmills compared to the new Jameson distillery, but that only works if you listen to the song now (Corb Lund released it in 2002).